Today, my video for you is how to hold the guitar pick. This is one of these details that is so important!
So, balance your pick on your finger, and press on the other side with your thumb.
Now, all you’re going to do, is just curl your finger around it.
Now, if you were to take your thumb off of your pick, it rests on the side of your finger because your finger has curled around the pick.
So, to begin, rest your pick on your finger, thumb presses in, finger curls around.
Now, if your finger’s ending up on the one side of the pick, just snug it back a little bit closer to the pick, so that your fingernail end are lined up with the pick.
You don’t want a bunch of your finger hanging out the side. That means you’ve got to snug up closer to the pick.
Important – Just only let about a quarter of the pick stick out. A floppy pick = sloppy playing. Choke up on that thing.
So why the importance of the finger curl? Well firstly it’s what I’ve noticed pro players do and the reasoning is this: it sets up your hand so the pick at a nice angle… about a 45 degree angle against the string.
We don’t actually want the pick flat against the string, we want a little bit of an angle, which will allow you to get onto the next strings faster and smoother because there is actually less contact against the string.
So the finger curl.. That is the first step of holding your pick correctly.
What I want to show you here, is that if you just place the pick directly across the string, of course the string is touching the pick,
Now, check this out: if you just put that pick on a little bit of an angle, then all of a sudden, all we have is the edge of the pick making contact with the string.
That’s WAY less pick contact with the string…So what??
Have you ever wondered how guitar players are able to pay so fast? And how are they’re able to play so clean? The pick angle is a huge, huge part.
If you want to get onto the next string quicker and faster, all those techniques that I showed you on the other video, sets you up really nicely, for having a natural angle with a pick.
See, we want a 45 degree angle on that pick grip.
What I want you to do, is imitate that Dick Dale, ‘The Surf Guitar King’ song. It’s the song that intro’ed the movie Pulp Fiction.
This is all done on the low E string with the first part of the song, just the open e string.
See if you can imitate it. Go really fast on that low E string, and FREEZE! Let’s have a look…
That’s where my pick was, it’s even more than a 45 degree angle.
There’s no way you can play that same speed, with the pick flat against the string. It’s just impossible!
So, if you get all these four videos/lessons together, we’ve got two different videos on stability points an this is the second video on how to hold a pick. If you get all these techniques down, what this is going to do is make you play cleaner, faster, and more accurately!
So, putting all those things together, it just makes you a little less crazy, you know? Because then you can hit the right note if you want to, you can have more GUITAR CONTROL.
Hope you like this video/lesson. I’ve got more that are coming out and some out already.
For full length lessons and a proven beginner method go to https://www.campfireguitarstar.com/StartHere
So, until then, keep on rippin’ it up!